Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

Dollhouses are an almost too-literal example of these women’s shrunken ambitions—of how, when you don’t have control over the big decisions shaping your life, you narrow your focus to a world that’s small enough for you to impose your will on it.

Since 1980, when the victims’ rights movement took off, higher-education spending in California has decreased by 13 percent, while investment in prisons has grown 436 percent; the state now spends far more money on prisons than it does on colleges and universities.

Rather, a crush is a way to take up space, and to make something about yourself known to the world.

The underlying, unarticulated assumption of this political talk was that victims and criminals were two distinct categories of people with diametrically opposed interests.

and hate and strength, about being beyond good and evil, about how being free from empathy

Nothing makes people more righteous than feeling they are in possession of a truth that others don’t want to hear.

Miniatures are satisfying not because they are grand, but because they are exact. “It is the accuracy, the rightness, that is so rewarding,” according to writer Alice Gregory. “It is a relief . . . to be in the presence of precision—and be allowed to like it.”

This low-key, ambient paranoia—this conviction that no place was secure and that any moment could tip into cataclysm—was a new feature of my consciousness, but it was lodged so firmly that I worried it was here to stay.

I want us to wonder what stories we’re most hungry for, and why; to consider what forms our fears take; and to ask ourselves whose pain we still look away from.